Reduce the challenges of cloud migration with RightScale

Whilst moving systems to the cloud can deliver savings in costs and efficiency, it presents new challenges in terms of managing systems and data.

With the launch of its Universal Cloud Appliance, California-based RightScale is aiming to deliver the self-service access that cloud users demand and give IT teams visibility and control over any cloud, any virtual machine, or any server through a single pane of glass.

Universal Cloud Appliance (UCA) supports Bare-metal server farms, virtualised environments such as KVM and Hyper-V, as well as clouds previously not supported by RightScale such as vCloud Air and Digital Ocean.

"RightScale enterprise customers use a wide range of infrastructure options, from existing virtualised and bare-metal datacenter environments to a variety of public and private clouds," says Kim Weins, VP of Marketing at RightScale. "Now our enterprise customers can use RightScale across any infrastructure that they run - any cloud, any VM, any server - by leveraging the Universal Cloud Appliance. RightScale customers will get a single point for visibility, control, monitoring, cost tracking, reporting, automation, and more".

UCA is delivered as a software appliance that can be downloaded and run on any server that has connectivity to the target resource pool. It provides a variety of out-of-the-box capabilities that can be used to manage individual servers and a plug-in model allows for RightScale, partners or customers to extend the functionality to include provisioning new resources on any platform. Combined with the RightLink agent, UCA enables a broad set of management, monitoring and governance capabilities.

The company says it can reduce development cycles and increase agility with faster provisioning, eliminate manual work with automation and orchestration, drive down spending with built-in cost controls, and help reduce risks with policy-based governance.